Translating migration: digital narratives, (anti) museums in action and documentaries

Abstract

This article investigates the modalities through which the migrant crisis is portrayed in the creative artistic sector that, in turn, has accelerated the spread of political participatory and activist movements in the areas of subtitling and amateur translation. This innovative trend involving the sphere of translation has been acting as an important stimulus for the international mushrooming of artistic creativities on public spaces and digital platforms, but also for the formation of new views on translation and interpretation as actively contributing to the reframing of the political aspects of the migrant crisis. Such a counter wave of artistic productions has emerged within a Europe that seems to be losing its humanity with respect to the migrant crisis against a media landscape in support of the spectacularization of migration. Against this backdrop of international political conflict, where immigrants and dispossessed refugees are nameless and voiceless, visual cultures, the arts, and social blogs have taken on a decisive role, on the one hand, in subverting the stereotyped media survey on migrants and war (Demos 2013; Mousland 2015, Shabi, 2016) and, on the other, in deconstructing the linguistic strategies and rhetorical discourse that characterize the language of the media. Drawing on recent research on narrative theory, critical discourse analysis and on the visual arts and audiovisual translation as forms of “reterritorialization” and “self-mediation” (Pérez-González 2014), this study will explore specific works from a heterogeneous corpus of counter narratives that range from documentaries and the performing arts to photo-text galleries and exhibitions. The scope will be to demonstrate how artistic framings in combination with patterns of linguistic and audiovisual interventions can significantly give rise to discourses and forms of translation for dissent and protest (Baker 2009; 2016).